Idea for operating systems, give your opinion

[ll2sco]

As I stated in the summary, I am not a programmer however I do wonder about the structure of operating systems.

While I haven't tried Linux much, and I've worked on Macs sparingly, my main observations come from my experience with XP and older Windows operating systems. In Windows, programs usually have to be installed on to the hard drive before they can work, and many also have to access the registry. I heard a while ago that the reason for this was because there wasn't enough RAM, so the OS had to use it sparingly and load only the necessary parts of a program into RAM as they are needed, while other data is stored on the hard drive.

The common problem with this, however, is your registry can become full of garbage which you have to get software to clean or suffer the speed lag. Also, there are times an application, even a mere web browser, can experience difficulties and slow or freeze everything else on your computer. Everyone has experienced this, and I don't see why any application can have that much power over the processor, or the OS.

So here's my idea. What if there was an operating system that only permitted programs to exist and run off of RAM. That is, you never install the programs, but they simply run along the surface of the operating system. This would be sort of like running an application off of a cd. If I am playing a game, for example, off of a cd that doesn't install anything onto my computer, I might get an error with that game but it won't crash the rest of the operating system.

With computers having 2, 4, and 6 gigs or more of RAM, I feel like this really could be possible. Or if there was a way to have the operating system exist on one drive, and the software ran from another. So you wouldn't have a C:/Programs Files or .dll files installed into the Windows directory.

I know this might sound like a novice question, but like I said, I'm not a programmer, but I just don't think it makes any sense that one program facing problems can crash the entire operating system and force you to restart.

Thoughts?

 

[bsobel]

come from my experience with XP and older Windows operating systems. In Windows, programs usually have to be installed on to the hard drive before they can work, and many also have to access the registry. I heard a while ago that the reason for this was because there wasn't enough RAM, so the OS had to use it sparingly and load only the necessary parts of a program into RAM as they are needed, while other data is stored on the hard drive.

The registry has nothing to do with lack of memory available to the operating system. It as to do with permanence and interoperability of components.

The common problem with this, however, is your registry can become full of garbage which you have to get software to clean or suffer the speed lag. Also, there are times an application, even a mere web browser, can experience difficulties and slow or freeze everything else on your computer. Everyone has experienced this, and I don't see why any application can have that much power over the processor, or the OS.

The machine doesnt freeze (generally) its the user interface. Windows continues to trade off usability/stability trying to reach a balance where a single application can not take the user experience out, but given the way users want items to interoperate this is a hard task.

So here's my idea. What if there was an operating system that only permitted programs to exist and run off of RAM. That is, you never install the programs, but they simply run along the surface of the operating system. This would be sort of like running an application off of a cd. If I am playing a game, for example, off of a cd that doesn't install anything onto my computer, I might get an error with that game but it won't crash the rest of the operating system.

Plenty of software already acts this way. Games for Windows acts this way for example...

I know this might sound like a novice question, but like I said, I'm not a programmer, but I just don't think it makes any sense that one program facing problems can crash the entire operating system and force you to restart.

I havent had to restart due a crashed application in Vista (to date at least)

 

[Smilin]

Hi ll2sco welcome to AT!

In Windows, memory is virtualized. If possible memory will be placed in RAM, if not it will be placed on disk. For programs the disk backed memory is the actual .exe file itself. For everything else it is the pagefile. Ideally windows will stick everything it can in RAM but clearly your whole HDD won't fit. The algorithms for balancing this ideal scenario versus the real world scenario is the work of many man-decades of labor in OS development.

The registry was designed to handle massive amounts of settings in a manner that makes it incredibly fast. "Bloat" in the registry really doesn't exist. Even if garbage piles up it doesn't slow things down. That's just a myth propogated by people trying to sell registry cleaners. Checkout "regmon" or the newer "procmon" from sysinternals to get an idea of just how much traffic the registry gets.

If you are really interested in this sort of stuff I would highly recommend Windows Internals by Mark Russinovich and David Solomon.

 

[Nothinman]

In Windows, programs usually have to be installed on to the hard drive before they can work, and many also have to access the registry.

The only reason that a lot of programs have to be installed is so that they can register themselves with various aspects of the system like Add/Remove programs, file associations, DCOM, etc. If it's a simple app that just does it's one job and doesn't interact with anything there's no need to have an installer for it.

I heard a while ago that the reason for this was because there wasn't enough RAM, so the OS had to use it sparingly and load only the necessary parts of a program into RAM as they are needed, while other data is stored on the hard drive.

Every OS already does this, it's called paging. Whenever a file is read into memory the OS only pages in the portions being asked for right now (with a little readahead for performance) so as to not waste memory incase the other parts of the file are never needed.

The common problem with this, however, is your registry can become full of garbage which you have to get software to clean or suffer the speed lag.

Only people who write registry cleaners actually believe that.

Also, there are times an application, even a mere web browser, can experience difficulties and slow or freeze everything else on your computer. Everyone has experienced this, and I don't see why any application can have that much power over the processor, or the OS.

A userland app can't actually freeze the whole system, it can go nuts and tie up a CPU and slow things down but that's about it. The kernel still controls who gets CPU time so even though it may take some time you can eventually get taskmgr up and kill whatever process is eating all of your CPU. I personally think the Linux scheduler handles that case better but CPU timeslices are something that people will never agree on.

So here's my idea. What if there was an operating system that only permitted programs to exist and run off of RAM. That is, you never install the programs, but they simply run along the surface of the operating system. This would be sort of like running an application off of a cd. If I am playing a game, for example, off of a cd that doesn't install anything onto my computer, I might get an error with that game but it won't crash the rest of the operating system.

Where the process is run from is irrelevant, a binary stored on a CD has exactly the same rights if you run it from a hard disk. And the latency with startup times when running large things from CDs would annoy the hell out of most people.

With computers having 2, 4, and 6 gigs or more of RAM, I feel like this really could be possible. Or if there was a way to have the operating system exist on one drive, and the software ran from another. So you wouldn't have a C:/Programs Files or .dll files installed into the Windows directory.

You can do that already but it won't affect the processes ability to eat resources.

I know this might sound like a novice question, but like I said, I'm not a programmer, but I just don't think it makes any sense that one program facing problems can crash the entire operating system and force you to restart.

And generally they can't unless they exploit or stumble upon a bug in the kernel causing you a BSOD or you're running them under an admin account and in that case you get what you deserve.